The rental market and housing market are two separate markets. Just because it costs $X to own a home doesn’t mean rent has to be $X or higher.

The same home could be rented for ~$4500 per month.

Keep in mind that most rented houses were purchased a while ago. If you bought the same house when it was $700K, you could still make a profit on a rent of $4500.

The reason why owning costs more is because buyers are also assuming appreciation. If you sell the same house for $1.5M 5 years later, you still make a nice profit even if your monthly cash flow is negative.

Also, once you hit 20% ownership, you no longer have to pay mortgage insurance.

I haven’t run the numbers lately to figure out which side wins, but the analysis is significantly more complicated than comparing monthly outlays in the first year.

That assumes that you can sell the house for more than what you bought it at.

You are correct that principle may be recouped and in addition, you get a mortgage interest tax deduction. However, you also pay 6% when you sell the place and maintenance costs (~1% per year) need to be accounted for.

There are several assumptions you need to make for owning to be cheaper than renting - that usually involves owning for a longer period of time (>5 years) and some modest appreciation (~3%+).

Of course, my numbers were from the SF market. There are many cities in the US where owning is cheaper than renting from day 1. SF just isn't one of those.

A good place to mention the NYTimes rent versus buy calculator: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

Not necessarily; as long as the value of the house[1] doesn’t fall more than the principal you’ve paid, you’ll get more cash from the sale than you put up as a down payment. The trouble with buying on margin, though, is that it amplifies losses— the worst single day in the stock market[2] was about a 20% drop, but you get the same effect from a 1% drop in your house value if you hold the 95% mortgage that you described.

  [1] Folding transaction fees into the effective value
  [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987)

Now I own my own place and I finally actually have rights and I will choose when I move on.

You cannot evict people because you want to sell (the new owner is your new landlord) or because you want to increase the rent. Unless you do something really wrong (like break things on purpose) you cannot be evicted.

About the only time to get rid of tenants is when you want to move in yourself, and then there is a longer protection time (3-9 months depending on the time you lived there). (Or I guess you can pay the renters to move out which I've seen sometimes.)

The rent can only be increased up to 15-20% in 3 years (without amenities), and can only be increased every 15 months. If you do renovations that improve the place you can demand 8% of the costs per year, but only up to 3€/sqm (or 2€/sqm if the place was cheap).

Still, prices in the cities have been going up a lot in the last few years (you can increase the rent when new tenants move in), but the prices to buy have gone up even more.

This is why you shouldn't agree to a rolling tenancy. When the initial tenancy period is over, negotiate for a year or two. Most landlords, in my experience, don't want their houses sitting empty so they're happy to have you on the hook for a year. Although, it depends where you live: I work remotely so I tend to rent in less expensive parts of the country like Devon where there isn't so much volatility in the market.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/longer-tenancy-plans-to-g...

Periodic (rolling) tenancies can be ended with two-month's notice, so the landlord might decide to evict rather than repair. With longer tenancy agreements, the landlord can't evict until the tenancy expires, and so tenants can use their legal rights to compel the landlord to make repairs.

In short, the landlord can't kick people out as an alternative to spending money on repairs.

Yes, they're technically "obligated" but only real recourse is to pay somebody to fix it yourself and deduct that from the rent. While doing that you have to be 100% reasonable though (no overcharging, get multiple quotes and landlord must be kept informed).

If you stop paying rent because repairs aren't made you can be evicted.

And then you get evicted after the negotiated period ends anyway.

You are correct that rent includes all the costs plus markup. But a big factor is that housing costs (esp in california) remain pretty steady once you buy. So that rent does include the housing cost...from 10, 20, x years ago.

Alternatively a developer builds a building and rents out the unit instead of marking up and selling units. So the cost isn’t as high as market price. An example: I recently rented a 1 bedroom in a desirable neighborhood for $3500 per month. Equivalent condos are over $1m dollars in that area. But it certainly didn’t cost the developer of my building $1m to build my unit.

This pattern is really common in high cost of living cities.

But what will the price be in 10 years? The mortgage will go down, especially if you pay above minimum repayments, your wages will go up (theoretically) helping you make those payments. The mortgage price will go down, bottoming out at $0 while the rent will always increase.

note: Amsterdam an outlier like SF.

(This is why I'm still renting...)

I would imagine things would be quite different and more like you say in more normal markets.

For example, you can rent an apartment on the peninsula in the Bay Area for less than $3,000 a month, but buying the smallest house you can find on the peninsula will cost you at least $4,500 a month for just the mortgage.

If you rent in this case you can take the $1,500 in savings (plus the savings from no property tax, maintenance, homeowners insurance, etc.), and save/invest it.

As a Swede in the middle of buying a house in the U.S. I have to say it's surprisingly similar.

The big differences between Sweden and the U.S. is the loan terms. Here in the U.S. the terms are extremely long, you'll typically get 10, 15 or 30 years with a locked interest rate. In Sweden you'd normally lock your rate for 1-5 years up to 10 years depending on your financial situation. When I owned a condo in Sweden I went for 1 year locked rate and then month-to-month once that first year passed. What you have instead of a fixed term is a fixed amortization. By law you have to pay back 2%/year until your principle is down to 70%, 1% until it's down to 50% and after that you can just pay interest if that's what you want to do.

It's not unusual for people to accept different compromises when they're not necessarily going to have to live somewhere indefinitely.

This comparison is usually apples to oranges. For example, in Austin, a 20s-30s homebuyer may have a budget of 300-400k for a property. This amount pretty much limits the options to homes on the edge of town or in suburbs. The same person may prefer renting in or near downtown, if they aren’t buying, and that could cost just as much as a mortgage on a much larger house (in a much less expensive location).

So, hard to do fair comparisons.

I suspect people, especially people considering buying their first home, have a specific profile of locations that behave in this new way because of that interest.

Basically just strike SF, NYC, Boston and Seattle of your list. Then strike off every city that lots of people from SF, NYC, Boston and Seattle are cashing out their inflated home values and moving to to raise their families off your list. The US is a big country. You're left with a very long list.

My sample size is <10 but 100% of the first time home buyers I know opted for a 2nd tier city or an exurb that's just barely within commuting range of wherever the big fat salaries are. The nature of the city other than physical location had approximately nothing to do with it. The techies who can drop a quarter mil on a 800ft^2 condo that's within biking distance of work and walking distance of a bunch of overpriced bars are in the minority and not indicative of overall trends. Take your narrow world view and even narrower assumptions of what young people want and shove it somewhere.